James Patterson - 10th Anniversary

A look passed between husband and wife.

Paul Richardson sighed deeply.

“Avis is in the bedroom,” he said. “Actually, Jordan is in there, too.”

I SAID to the Richardsons, “Please take the baby to the kitchen. Lie down with him on the floor. Go. Now.”

The Richardsons looked startled, but they did as I said.

I pulled my gun, Rich pulled his, and we flanked the door to the bedroom.

I shouted, “Avis Richardson. Jordan Ritter, this is Sergeant Boxer. It’s all over. Come out with your hands up.”

There was silence, but before Rich could kick in the door, we heard Ritter’s voice.

“Sergeant. We don’t have any weapons.”

The door opened and Ritter came out with his hands up. He hadn’t shaved and his cheeks were sunburned. Even so, he still looked like an ad for an upscale men’s clothing line.

Rich spun Ritter around and flattened him against the wall. He frisked him and was cuffing him as Avis darted out of the bedroom.

Avis had her hands up, too, but she was wiggling one of her fingers to draw my attention to a shiny gold band.

“We got married,” she cried. “Jordan and I got married.”

“Congratulations,” I said as I threw her against the wall with great satisfaction.

Once again, in my heart I wanted to slap this girl. Instead I cuffed her and said, “Avis Richardson, you’re under arrest for child trafficking, neglect of a child, and obstruction of justice. You have the right to remain silent …”

Suddenly a desperate kind of mayhem broke out around me.

Sonja and Paul Richardson swarmed around their daughter, and the baby wailed, then drew a breath and wailed some more.

To my left, Conklin arrested Jordan Ritter for kidnapping and statutory rape. Ritter was yelling, “I want to see my son,” as Conklin read him his rights.

I stuck my face three inches from Ritter’s nose. “ Shut the fuck up ,” I said.

Next I called for an ambulance for the baby.

“What’s going to happen to Avis?” Paul Richardson asked me as I took the baby out of his wife’s arms.

“She’ll be booked and kept in holding until her arraignment,” I said. “If you want my advice, hire the best attorney you can buy. Maybe he’ll get her tried as a juvenile. I’d also make a few calls and get your daughter’s marriage to this sleazebag annulled.”

MY EYELIDS FLEW OPEN. I stared up at the information that Joe’s projection clock flashed onto the ceiling. It was October 11. Fifty-four degrees. 6:02 a.m.

I had been in midthought when I’d woken myself up, but what had I been thinking?

Joe stirred beside me and said, “Linds. You up?”

“Sorry to wake you, hon. I was dreaming. I think.”

He turned toward me and enfolded me in his arms. “You remember the dream?”

I tried to backtrack, but the dream was gone. What was worrying me? Joe was safe. The Richardson baby was at St. Francis, perfectly well. Then I had it.

Candace Martin.

I was thinking about her.

I started to tell Joe why Candace Martin was surfing my nocturnal brain waves, but he was already snoring softly against my shoulder. I disengaged myself and put my feet on the floor.

Joe murmured, “What?”

“I’ve got to go to work,” I said. “I’ll call you later.”

I kissed his cheek, ruffled his hair, and tucked the covers under his chin. I snapped my fingers and Martha jumped onto the bed. She circled a couple of times, then dropped into the hollow I’d left behind.

Less than an hour later, I blew into the Hall of Justice with two containers of coffee.

I took the back stairs two steps at a time, and elbowed open the stairwell door to the eighth floor. I negotiated the maze of corridors that led to the DA’s department.

Yuki was at her desk in a windowless office. Her glossy black hair, parted in the middle, fell forward as she stared down at her laptop. My shadow crossed her desk.

“Hey,” she said, looking up. “Lindsay. What’s wrong?”

“Something is. Okay for me to see the picture of Candace Martin in the car with that hit man Gregor Guzman?”

“Why?”

She stretched her arm across her desk and took a coffee container from my hand. “You don’t mind if I ask why you’re still messing around with my case, do you?”

“Could I just see it again, Yuki? Please. That photo is bothering me.”

Yuki glared at me, bent toward her laptop, and tapped a few keys. She swiveled the computer around so that I could see the screen.

“I could use a copy of that.”

Yuki shook her head no. But at the same time, the printer made a grinding sound, and a black-and-white photo chugged into the tray. Yuki handed it to me.

“I’d give you a harder time,” she said, “but the judge wants to see me in chambers. I’m in the bad-girl corner again. Don’t make trouble for me, Lindsay. I mean it.”

I wished her luck with LaVan and ran for the exit before Yuki could change her mind.

MINUTES AFTER LEAVING Yuki’s office, I signed the visitor’s log at the entrance to the women’s jail on the seventh floor. It was loud in this wing. The clanging of metal doors and the angry clamor of prisoners rose up around us as an officer escorted me to one of the small, bare conference rooms.

Candace Martin soon appeared in the doorway. She made eye contact with me as the guard removed her cuffs, then took the chair across from me at the scarred metal table.

“This is an unexpected surprise,” she said.

Candace didn’t have any makeup on, hadn’t had her hair done professionally in a year, and was wearing a prison jumpsuit in a shade of orange that didn’t flatter blondes.

Still, Candace Martin had her dignity and her professional demeanor.

I said, “I’m here unofficially.”

“With good news, I hope.”

I pulled the printout of the photo from my pocket and placed it faceup on the table. “Please look at this picture and tell me why you’re inside this vehicle with this man.”

She said, “I’ve seen that picture. That’s not me.”

The overhead light cast three hundred watts of bright white fluorescence, lighting every part of the small room. The red eye of a security camera watched from a corner of the ceiling as the woman in orange slid the photo closer and picked it up.

“I don’t know either of these people,” she said. Then, as though she had been struck with an afterthought, she studied the photo intently again and asked me, “What do you see in this woman’s hand?”

She pushed the grainy black-and-white printout back across the table. The woman in the picture had her head tipped forward, her blond hair covering half her face, and she seemed to be clutching a chain that was fastened around her neck. I saw the glint of a pendant dangling from her clasped fingers.

“Maybe some kind of charm,” I said.

“Could it be a cross?” Candace Martin asked me.

“I suppose.”

“I don’t wear thin gold chains with charms or crosses,” Candace Martin said to me. “But you know Ellen Lafferty, don’t you? Ellen always wears a cross. I’ve got to say, I wonder what it means to her.”

CANDACE MARTIN was due back in court in an hour, and if my belief in her innocence was warranted, I couldn’t “mess around” with Yuki’s case fast enough. Every day that Candace was on trial, she was a day closer to being convicted of murder in the first degree.

As hard as it would be to convince the court that the wrong person was on trial, it would be a snap compared with getting a murder conviction overturned.